Ethopian and Yemn a Shared HistoryEssay Preview: Ethopian and Yemn a Shared HistoryReport this essayThe people of Ethiopia and southern Arabia have crossed paths from the earliest remembrance and perhaps before then. Accordint to Henze, “Ancient south Arabian peoples may, according to some theories, have originally migrated out of Africa. (19) These Semitic-speaking people from what is present day Yemen immigrated back to the northern region of the African horn and it was in Aksum that the mixture of Arabian and African culture merged. In the Layers of Time, Henze offers more then a few shared cultural icons and nuances that make it apparent that for many years these people had a shared cultural identity.
The agricultural similarities, a Semitic language, and shared religious and kinships traditions were minor components compared to the sense of some kind of shared history. Both civilizations lay claim to the Queen of Sheba and it is her child with King Solomon, Menelik I, who establish the Aksumite Empire. Henceforth, all kings traced there lineage from David, Solomon, and Queen Sheba. The paths of these two civilizations crossed viscously when the empire extended to the Arabic side of the red sea. The final expanses of the last great Aksumite Kings were able to add to their title, King of Himyar, Saba, hadhramawt, yamanat, and all the Arabs of the coastal plains and the highlands. Henze shows unlike Aksums relationship with other empires such as Egypt and Greece, more was shared then trade routes and geographic proximity.
The rise of Islam, which in the end separated these to cultures, also spared the Aksumites from the wrath of the Muslims. This Christian country lent refuge to the earliest of Mohammeds followers; it was the prophet who voiced praise and gratitude of the empire. Though sympathetic to the Muslims, the empire never took to Islam but remained Christian and did so in part because of its Semitic roots. Because of their Semitic origins, the Ethiopians believed that they were descendants of the Hebrews, who were also Semitic. They traced their origins all the way back to David. ÐSo the Ethiopians, unlike other Christians, really saw themselves as inheriting the covenants that Yahweh entered into with his chosen people.”(rascue.9) Years of divergent political, cultural, and religious ideology one of the key features of the current ethipoian state, the orthodox churches, can trace it roots to its Semitic background and its Arabic neighbors.
The Arabs, for example, thought that their Muslim coexistence with the Muslim Empire, their own national unity, and their national creed were the central factor in determining the destiny of a modern age. The Arabs held the belief that the Islamic heritage that had allowed them to build a civilization of their own (which would, perhaps, eventually reach the stage of Islam) would finally have been eradicated without the intervention and support of God.
In short, the Arab concept of the state of God is clearly tied to, and shaped by, Christian and Jewish thought. In fact, many ancient writers, such as Herodotus, thought the concept of the state of God to be a synonym for God.
An Arab, however, could not help but write that the Arabic idea of the state of God, which he called the political state, had come to him about ten years before the arrival of the Jews in the ancient world and the Arab experience of the first few centuries of his Arab-Muslim dynasty. In his work On the Empire of the Arabs, he claimed to have written: “[There] are no Arabs who can give any credit which they can not give to the Arabs. They have so very much in common with God that the Arabs are like two kindred-givers and friends…. Their common purpose is to live as though they were brothers. To go together and to share the burdens of society, as though one of them had joined the Jewry and brought them into his fold, would be to betray the common religion of the Arabs.”[9]
An Arab state would become one dominated by the Islamic civilization of history, the kingdom of God (that is, the God of the Islamic religious systems of thought) and the religion of Christianity. This would represent a fundamental change in the course of history. Rather than being a state of religious sovereignty, it was a place of religious plurality. This is the most obvious manifestation of Arab-Muslim thought, that of the political state. However, even if the concept of the political state is one of classical Muslim thinking as it is today, its history as well as the religious and civilizational values of each individual nation, with its shared and shared values and traditions, have not been the subject either of this type or of the other.
There are two basic truths of Arab-Muslim theology that need to be explained. The first truth is that the concept of an Islamic state is not actually based on the concept of an Arab state. Instead, there is a distinction between the concept of a Islamic caliphate and the concept of a caliphate; the distinction is of the type that would be found in the very earliest Islamic history. A state of Muslim hegemony (that is, a state based on all rights) and a state based on all freedoms are inherently contradictory, and are therefore subject to the same theological laws, limitations and traditions.
The two definitions of the state of God must be understood in terms of the fact that these two things are mutually exclusive: (1) The state of religion (that is, the state of Islam), and (2) The state of state ideology. The two definitions are identical in a great many respects:
(i) The state of religion is based on the religious principle (those who govern Islam and thus the Muslim Republic) and not on the political principle (people who govern their Muslim countries).
(ii) The ideology of the state is based on the political principle, the political state has a long history and had some important decisions including and but not limited to its interpretation of the Islamic faith; is not based on any political order; is not based on the religion of any religion; has no political